Ghosts
by Dead End Signs
Summary: 1957 - post KotCS. When Mutt returns to school, he didn't bargain on seeing ghosts and eerie figures wandering his world. What is going on here? And what do these ghastly figures have to do with the extra-terrestrials from Akator?
1. Independence

I'm not too sure about this one myself, but I would like to have a hack at a Mutt centric story. I'd like to keep this one in the shadows while I work on my longer Indy fic, but if it proves to be okay I might consider speeding up its updates. I like Mutt - but I don't think I've got him down right yet - practice makes perfect. The premise for this is Mutt has received that 'gift' from the aliens at Akator - sort of like Spalko but toned down a bit. I might solve this through a huge Indy adventure or a more subtle solution - depends on the response ;D The title is subject to change and no characters belong to me etc. This first chapter is literally just setting the scene really. Hope it's okay - didn't put my all into it.

Ghosts

Mutt was walking, no, strolling… no, _waltzing_ down the hallway, schoolbag slung across his jacketed shoulder and scowl planted firmly across his features. The keys to his bike swinging casually from a finger, Mutt was determined to come across as defiant and confident as physically possible. He grinned smarmily at passers by, male or female, there was no differentiation between the two today. His patronising glares received similar looks in return. The drop-out was back, they were uttering. He could hear their sharp whispers as well as their louder comments. He shrugged them off. He could shrug them all off.

With a smirk he approached his first class. His first class in a long time. The door flew open, and like the billowing sail of a ship in the winds, he whirled into the classroom, raising a daring eyebrow at the teacher as she opened her mouth to ask why he was late. She rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue. She had hoped she wouldn't need to teach this boy again once he had ceased to exist on her register. Now, she stopped over the roster and scrawled 'Mutt Williams' underneath the printed names of the other pupils, staring longingly at the black line she had crossed through his name before. She didn't care she never used his real name. The boy really was a mutt.

What an anticlimax, Mutt heard himself think. He'd crossed swords with Russians atop speeding vehicles, fought natives armed with blow-darts in a graveyard that was the epitome of pathetic fallacy, and he could still see the crystal skeletons of the extra-terrestrials, sitting and waiting in silence on their golden thrones. Yet here he was, in a class he had no interest in, forced to attend school by a man he barely knew but claimed to be his father.

As he pondered his unsatisfactory fate and let things mull over in his mind, settling there to become stagnant later, he felt something brush his shoulder. A crude paper plane had landed on his desk, skittering across its surface for a moment before Mutt snatched it up. He unfurled it noisily and met a poor drawing that he had to guess was of himself.

"Hey Arty, you must draw the same amount of masterpieces as you pull chicks!" he called back after having spied the artist's signature at the bottom of the wing.

"Hey Mutt, you must return to the same amount of schools you drop out of!" came the rapid reply, the speaker a feathery haired individual flanked by three others, varying each other in the same way a crocodile varied from the birds that picked at its teeth. One was more monster than teenager, the second had a bean-pole physique and probably a nickname to match, the third was a dark-haired, sneaky looking, weasel resembling—

Mutt squared his shoulders and leaned over his desk, unwilling to verbally battle it out with Arty. He stretched his arms across the desk and basked in the sunlight filtering through the blinded windows. He sat out the rest of the lesson yawning and waiting for his eyelids to completely close over. With a snort he woke up suddenly, aware that there was no-one left in the classroom bar the teacher lurking by her desk, head bowed over homework as she marked it.

"You fell asleep, Mr. Williams. But don't worry," she stated, looking up and adjusting her thick glasses, "It was a welcome relief."

Mutt had forgotten what she had even been teaching, so he slipped his bag onto his back and exited the classroom with a final yawn. His boots squeaked on the polished floor. He closed his eyes when he remembered how they had sounded on ruddy dirt, scuffing across the ground littered with leaves and debris, on the worn stones of the hidden temple at Akator…

A teacher emerged from his office, arms laden with papers and folders, and tilted his head at the boy standing in the middle of the corridor as he approached. "Go outside to lunch and enjoy the sunshine, young man. No sense standing about in here, unless you need to be? Here, if you want to stay inside then take these files down the hall there, first door on your left. Stick 'em on the desk and someone will collect them later." he asked, slowing his pace and, without waiting for an answer, he thrust the files into Mutt's middle, the boy's hands clutching them feverishly.

"I'm your man, sir." Mutt answered, his tone dripping in subtle sarcasm. The teacher marched away, glad to have one more job done. Mutt adjusted the mass of papers obscuring his vision all of a sudden and set off. He used his elbow to painfully open the door, pushing down on the handle with it, and promptly dumped the files on the desk. The papers on the top began to slide from the pile. Mutt reached out with a sigh to steady them when suddenly, with an ear-peircing scream that sounded as if it had begun before he'd heard it, a vision, a ghost, a _person_ for a split second, flickered before him. It disappeared as soon as it had arrived, but the scream still lingered in the air before being sharply stopped, like a hand had clapped across a mouth. The papers flew to the floor and Mutt stumbled back with a yelp, adrenaline coursing through his being. He slipped on an exam paper beneath his feet and grasped the handle fervently, yanking open the door and spilling out onto the shining hall floor with a grunt.

He looked up, and his eyes widened at what they saw.

More ghosts were drifting in and out of sight, their colours washed out and their forms translucent as they flickered, pacing the hall, babbling and voices coming and going as they did. They looked like damaged film recordings, and Mutt stood up with a panicked yell, racing through the hall, not stopping to avoid more figures, which he found instead of passing through, he bowled over and knocked into. He could see the startled expressions on their misty faces. He risked a glance back when he slammed into his teacher as she left her classroom. She staggered back, gripping his shoulders and holding him away from her.

"What is the matter, Mr Williams?!" she breathed, worried for him, until a second later in which the worry became frustration.

"Did you see that?! Did you see 'em?! They were all over the place Miss Fitzpatrick! They were all over the hall! Like rats!" he responded, ripping free from her and careering forward to the main doors, lockers passing by in coloured blurs.

Miss Fitzpatrick had stood stock still as his footsteps receded, before squeaking and racing back into her classroom with a shriek of 'Rats!'

Mutt jumped down the stone steps two at a time before landing hard on the sidewalk and just about retaining his balance. He heaved in the fresh breeze and bent double, resting his hands on his knees. His legs were kicked out from under him a moment later, and he was forced to throw his hands to the ground to cushion his fall. He got up with a disgruntled expression and turned his head to hear mad cackling before he spotted Arty and his cronies sauntering away. Brushing down his jeans, the keys to his bike already biting into his fingers, he rushed to his beloved vehicle and gave her an affectionate pat before settling down on the saddle and catching his breath. The engine roared to life and the bike flew flat out down the street, wheels spinning, and its chrome gleaming and winking in the afternoon sun, and all the while Mutt was blinking back panic and instead concentrating on keeping his eyes on the road.

The road home.


	2. Confidence

I am so sorry this took forever to appear! Unfortunately family tragedy rather stopped my desire to write anything :( But I'm back now, and this chapter, despite being a little messy in my opinion, is a bit longer to make up for that :) Thank you so much for your kind reviews, I'm so surprised people like it! ;D Things may seem a little unexplained in this chapter, but bear with me and all will be revealed :D

Introduction of a character of my own in this one, I'm no fan of writing in a female love interest for the sake of it, so my OC is male and far from perfect xD Forgive any mistakes, spelling or otherwise. I'm going to edit here and there where it needs it, but I feel I'd like to put it up for you guys! Thanks again, I'll update much sooner next time!

* * *

It was two o'clock. Or probably two o'clock. Either suited Mutt down to the ground. So what if he'd skipped his afternoon classes? Everyone did it. He had reason to suspect tired Miss Fitzpatrick had done it back in her youth, so if it was good enough for teachers, it was good enough for the students. He ran over a few excuses in his mind, ones he'd used before here and there for this and that, ones that followed the same general pattern so it was simply a case of stringing verbs and adjectives together and slotting them into the gaps. The 'dog ate my homework' line had backfired at school the first and only time he had used it, as it had prompted suggestions that he had ingested his own assignments.

The wind whipped past, scratching at his face as it hit him, but he welcomed the breeze, he hoped it would slap some sense into him. Weaving almost lazily through the crawling traffic, he read the map he had committed to memory and guided himself home idly. It was just the sun, giving him double vision. He had nothing to worry about. He shrugged his shoulders and relaxed, hoping to melt into the saddle.

The public library. Usually he soared straight past it, engines roaring so as to block the irritable concept of reading and learning. Today however, the bike mounted the sidewalk and grumbled away to itself while its rider contemplated the entrance. Eventually the engines were quietened and it rolled onto a little grass square beside the stone steps that led upwards to the library's gaping maw. The patch of grass, Mutt assured himself, had been laid down just for him. How quaint. He smirked and chained the old girl up, kicking a cloud of spores and dry dirt at the 'keep off the grass' sign.

As embarrassing as it was to be seen surmounting the warm grey steps, Mutt knew what he was looking for. Of course, what ten year old wasn't fascinated and delightfully disturbed by the thought of his domicile being plagued by a hanged woman with a bruised ring around her neck, or the little child who had caught a terrible disease and vomit constantly bubbled from its mouth as a result? Ghosts were the unknown, and the unknown wasn't permitted to be unknown for long.

Mutt shoved a shoulder against the heavy double doors, passing a fellow, his arms laden with books of varying size, and was hit by the cool air that circulated around the cold flagstones, the tall bookshelves and the spiral staircases. Apart from the occasional 'clang clang' of feet ascending those stairs, there was an eerie silence. A muffled cough possibly, over there, and the scraping of a chair here, was the extent of the noise that slid from the quiet.

Rather than sift through chunky volume after chunky volume of books or become lost in the labyrinth of shelves, Mutt straightened his jacket and made straight for the main inquiries desk. A young woman sat behind it, scribbling down notes and flicking through directories. Her bright blonde hair was scraped back into a simple ponytail, and her spindly, spider like frame could have snapped under the weight of a reasonably heavy tome. As Mutt approached her gingerly, she looked up and he was met with a long sharp nose, a small mouth and unblinking eyes.

The journey to the desk appeared to take a lifetime; one foot after the next obviously didn't cut it. When he did arrive before the woman however, he leaned his elbows on the counter and gave her a sharp smile. "Hey, I'm looking for some books…" he began, eyes flicking across the library's expanse.

"I'm sorry we don't have any books." She responded bluntly, peering down her pointed nose at him. She was the type of woman who did not tolerate young men such as the one who stood before her now. Upon noting the young man's reaction to her statement, she sighed. "This is a library, sir. You'll find books here. Was there anything in particular you wanted?" she said curtly, inwardly taking pleasure in thinking he was scouring for the children's section.

"Ghosts?" Mutt tried.

"Ghosts?" she repeated, curling a nostril, "I thought you were looking for some books?"

"Books…_about_ ghosts…" Mutt tried again, wringing his hands. This environment was cold. He felt nothing for it. No passion, no joy. This was not his habitat. The people were spiked and prickly, their spines flying up in defence whenever a creature like himself invaded. They disliked his kind, the drop outs, the leather-clad animals that raced through college grounds without a care in the world for academics. They had heard what stunts he had pulled at Marshall College. They were a different breed.

The woman raised an eyebrow, a pencil streak across pale canvas, and bowed her head, thumbing through her directory. Her silver birch fingers moved deftly across each page, gleaming nails running down through names and information. Mutt meanwhile drummed his fingers on the desk's dark, stained wood and looked about him, locking eyes with one or two bookworm types pouring over their literature. There was a quiet attention seeking cough from the woman and Mutt lazily turned his head to her.

"I'm sorry, but the majority and most reliable of our books on ghosts have been withdrawn. We still have plenty of novels that have-"

"Sorry lady, but I really need to know who has them. I need those books." Mutt replied brusquely, leaning over the desk and looking her straight in the eye, yet hoping to catch a glance at the directory.

"Sir, that information cannot be disclosed to you. You can, however, request them the moment they return…" the woman went on, but Mutt couldn't hear her.

Someone was walking aimlessly towards him. A shimmering, flickering sort of someone. It stopped, as if it had seen him. He tilted his head, puzzled. The ghost creature held out a slim arm, fingers stretched out to him nervously. Mutt could just about see the ghost's face, and it mirrored his own. Confusion. Mutt lifted a hand to it and the moment the tips of their fingers touched, the ghost recoiled with a gasp and fell backwards, scrambling away before fading completely. Mutt blinked and turned back to the woman, who was still talking yet seemed a little baffled by his strange antics. Mutt ran his hands down his face and looked at her. "Lady, I'm sorry to leave you hanging but I really gotta go. Thanks though, you've been a real help!" he said after regaining his composure and with that he ran briskly to the exit, leaving the woman to wonder whether his parting words were of a sarcastic tone or not, and she would ponder on it for the rest of the day.

Outside, Mutt stood at the top of the steps, the sun idly pouring down its afternoon rays. He shook his head and banished all thoughts on what had happened from his mind for now. Sitting on the bottom step was the man he had passed on the way in, the one with his own mass in books weighing down his arms. Mutt breathed a laugh. The guy looked pathetic even from the back. He descended the steps; glad his mind had something else to think about, when he happened to glance down to one of the books the other had dropped.

_Ghosts and Haunted Places._

The man's hand suddenly obscured the cover and lettering as he proceeded to pick it up, and he looked at the young man stooped over him with eyes as wide as dinner plates.

'Ha! Yes!" Mutt exclaimed, relieved that whoever didn't much like him up there had taken a sudden shining to him. The man, whose nose was merrily bleeding and enjoying itself dripping blood from his chin, frowned and tightened his jaw.

"Oh yes, it's hilarious isn't it?" he uttered, piling 'Ghosts and Haunted Places' on top of his extensive collection. Mutt couldn't lose this guy. He was the one who had the largest collection of non-fiction on ghosts for a fifty mile radius, it seemed. Immediately he crouched and picked up a couple of fallen books next to his boot and handed them to the other. Mutt studied his face. He had a long nose and an untameable sort of dark hair that could do what it liked yet still look presentable. His brown eyes looked tired, more so than his face suggested. He was barely a decade older than Mutt. The man ran his hand, frustrated, across his face in an attempt to tidy himself up and continued to fume silently.

"What happened?" Mutt asked, trying to slip concern into his tone.

"What do you think? You people, do you get some sort of kick out of terrorising everything that moves?" the man snapped, his accent British, and Queen's English at that. Mutt nearly took a step back, but he stood fast.

"Hey man, look, I didn't hit you or run you over or whatever happened. Just trying to help. It's kinda funny…"

"What is?" the Englishman replied, dejectedly.

Mutt picked up the last book and held it out to him, his smile confident. "Don't judge a book by its cover."

"Quite. I apologise." The other stated blandly, taking the book warily. He stood up, his arms full of books once again, and carefully made his way down the steps, leaving Mutt turning over options in his mind. He needed those books. He needed some serious fact, rather than his mother's guessed ones or his teacher's excuses in order to send him on his way. Books didn't have opinions, or voices, or feelings. He could do what he liked with them. He wondered why bullies didn't pick on them more often. He watched the man clamber into a car and dump the books on the back seat. It took a few seconds for it to click in Mutt's mind, but when it did; his bike was released from its chain, the engines flared up, impatient, and the chase began.


End file.
